Middle and HS History Rec - Love this book: A Young People's History of the United States
TLDR: This is a culturally informed book that does not glass over the uglier parts of American History and stays factual and not mythmaking:
When I started homeschooling my 6th grader, one of my priorities was finding history resources that didn't gloss over the complicated parts. Rather than presenting a sanitized version of the past, I wanted him to engage with the full story of how our country came to be — the inspiring parts alongside the difficult ones.
We landed on Howard Zinn's work. There's an excellent adult edition, great for older high schoolers, and the Young People's version is a wonderful starting point around 6th grade. It's the kind of book worth revisiting as kids mature, since each re-read brings new context and understanding. What I love about it is how clearly it distinguishes between the problems in our society that are accidents of history, those that emerged organically as systems, and those that were deliberately designed.
One passage that really stuck with me explores how wealthy landowners in the colonial era worked to position poor white indentured servants as socially "above" enslaved Black people. The book makes the case that this wasn't incidental — it was a strategy to prevent the two groups from recognizing their shared interests and uniting against the small class of wealthy elites who benefited from both of their labor. In other words, it presents racial hierarchy not just as prejudice, but as a tool engineered to keep working people divided.
Reading chapters like this, I keep thinking: how much would change if more of us understood this history? It feels like a lot of what we accept as "just the way things are" might look very different in that light.